A fine column on how you should vote. Even if their candidates are far less than the ideal, if you are a fiscal conservative and in favor of small government, vote Republican.
Maybe you were not that excited that 2012 gave you a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I sympathize — I liked Rick Perry. But how is President Romney vs. President Obama a hard choice? How is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a hard choice? How is Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a hard choice?
It isn’t.
The question wasn’t “Mitt Romney — yes or no?” It was: “Mitt Romney — compared with what?”
Compared with this.
The Obama administration has handed conservatives — and, more important, the country — disaster after disaster after disaster. Rather than scaling back the most worrisome aspects of the surveillance state and the so-called War on Terror, President Obama has expanded on them. Taxes are up, spending is up (2013 spending was $250 billion more than 2009, itself not exactly a banner year for fiscal restraint), health insurance is a chaotic mess subject to ad hoc revision every time Democratic political necessities demand it, our allies are dispirited, our enemies emboldened, our religious liberties under attack by the very government entrusted with defending them, our economy anemic, with too many of our people unemployed and those who are employed earning too little.
I am not naïve enough to believe that having elected Mitt Romney president or consigning the Democrats to the minority in both houses of Congress would change all that. But unless you are ready to give up on electoral politics entirely — and I confess to wavering on that question with a bias toward despair — then it is a matter of deciding whether X is preferable to Y. And sometimes that is a pretty easy call.